Sigh. Writing XML DOM code

Sigh. Writing XML DOM code

I had to create a quick tool last week that had the simple task of parsing through an XML file and getting a set of atrributes from any node that had a specific value for a different attribute. This is vaguely the equivalent of writing down the license plate numbers of all pickups in a parking garage and ignoring the cars. Sounds simple, but it is always surprising to me how much code I have to write to work with the XML DOM in the .net framework.

And I'm leaving out the code that sets the path to the Text file and the calling code as well.

That seems to be quite a bit of code just to get some string data out of a file. The trickiest part was the "//" in the SelectNodes command - Xpath needs this to know to search sub nodes. About 20 lines, depending on how you count them, seems like plenty to get this done.

Oh, and I also left out the logging I used to log the results from this.

I've read a little about Linq and how it can help here but I simply have not had time to learn that library. If there is a another small project like this that comes up maybe I can carve out some time to learn that and hopefully will need to write less code in the future.

Anyway, every time I write code using the DOM I always am amazed at how much code results, even in a simple case like this.